At this moment, I thought that it would be nice to rough in the key lighting and the skin color. J.K. has some interesting rosy areas in his face, like the mouth and chin. The coloring work was very much exaggerated at this point (Fig.02).

Fig. 02

The likeness wasn't there yet and, after leaving the illustration for some hours, I re-opened the file and realized that I wasn't satisfied with the result so far. I love his comedic performances, but on the other hand, J.K. has a lot of strong, serious performances in a lot of great movies and TV shows. Because of that, I decided to try an idea that I'd had some time ago for another piece: why not try to mix more than one facial expression together, in the same image?

Facial Study

I went back to the facial study to research some ways to mix at least two expressions of J.K. At the beginning of this process, I gave special attention to the eyebrow wrinkles in his face topology. Analyzing some pictures of him, I extracted some key points that, in my opinion, could characterize his most pleasant facial expressions (Fig.03).

Fig. 03

I took this opportunity to smooth the skin color. Afterwards, I looked again at the caricature and felt that I was heading down the right path. Before refining the details, I was still missing the likeness and could see that I still had a lot of improvements to do (Fig.04 - 05).